What Bernal Heights is like to work in
Small houses are not fast houses. A nine-hundred square foot cottage off Cortland Avenue has the same number of bathrooms, kitchen surfaces and window sills as something twice the size, packed into rooms where a vacuum has to be lifted rather than pushed. Furniture sits close to walls, storage is stacked, and the useful measure of a visit is edges rather than area — which is exactly what a square-foot quote gets wrong.
Access is the other thing. Several lanes on the north slope are steps or single-track with nowhere legal to stop, and around Holly Park the grades are steep enough that a crew parks once and does not come back for anything forgotten. If your address is on a stair lane, say so at booking. It changes nothing about the price and everything about how the trolley gets loaded.
The building stock here
Stock is mostly small wood-frame houses from 1900 to 1940, with a genuine scattering of 1906 relief cottages absorbed into later buildings, plus post-war infill and the narrow half-houses the hill is known for. Ceilings are low, often eight feet or less. Floors are fir, sometimes original and sometimes covered over. Kitchens and bathrooms keep their original footprint even where fittings are new. Rear extensions dug into the slope add a level below with less headroom.